Mountain View-based startup Swipp, which earlier this year launched its social interest platform for consumers to share what they think of “a person, place or thing”, has taken the natural next step by introducing Swipp Plus: a tool for businesses to mine the consumer data that its opinion graph generates. To fund the new product, Swipp has also announced an additional $2 million institutional investment, extending the $3.5 million it previously raised from Old Willow Partners.

Swipp says Swipp Plus is designed to “increase customer interaction and provide real-time customer insight around products, brands, and offers”. It joins the ranks of opinion monitoring tools for marketers to gather intel from social networks, such as Hootsuite et al. However the difference is that Swipp has built its own social sentiment platform as well as now a suite of tools to track opinion on it. Swipp’s “quantifiable sentiment layer”, as it describes its platform, may not have the huge user-base of Facebook or Twitter but it’s specifically designed to generate the kind of market research data that businesses crave.

Although it’s possible to pull consumer sentiment data off other social networks, Swipp not only has opinionated comments organised by topic but users also score the person/place/thing they are ‘swipping’ — generating Swipp’s quantifiable data. This allows it to measure and track opinion changes over time. It’s also capturing user location so Swipp can figure out what’s hot and what’s not in different global regions.

It’s unclear how many users Swipp’s consumer platform has accrued so far but presumably a lot less than social’s giants — so whether its data is particular compelling to businesses yet is questionable. That said, the Swipp Plus ‘self-service’ tool is free so there’s nothing to stop companies kicking its tyres. Swipp is also offering a Swipp Enterprise offering, tailored to the needs of larger businesses, which does carry a (bespoke) price-tag.

Swipp said the Swipp Plus suite allows users to track terms, create embeddable widgets, and gauge sentiment on a variety of topics, including products and brand names.